fdisk not working on new drive

[Tracy Nelson <tnelson@fast.net>]

Hi, how's everybody doing today?

I'm having trouble with fdisk.  I picked up a new "8.4G" (measured in
"marketing gig", 1G=1000000 bytes) drive and I can't get fdisk to
partition it the way I want (note that I didn't say "properly" ;).  The
drive is a "CompUSA" (Maxtor), 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16383 cylinders.

Here's what I'm doing:  I set up a 100M root partition, and an 8.3G
extended partition.  This part goes well.  I then try to set up three 1G
logical partitions in the extended partition.  I can do this, but when I
verify the partition table, I get warnings that my partitions overlap. 
Looking at the table, I notice that the entry under "Begin" (beginning
of data area, I think) doesn't match the first block of my partition. 
For example, here's a part of my partition table:

Device		Boot	Begin	Start	End	Blocks
/dev/hdc1		1	1	204	102784+
/dev/hdc2		205	205	16383	8154216
/dev/hdc5		205	205	2285	1048792+
/dev/hdc6		2048	2286	4366	1048792+

I read the README.fdisk file, but that didn't mention why I would get
overlaps.  I'm also curious about the plus signs after my blocks.  As I
understand it, that means that the number of blocks don't fit within the
cylinder boundaries.  Doesn't fdisk round up to the nearest cylinder
boundary if you specify you want a partition to be of a certain size?

Would I get myself into trouble if I just moved the begin marker to the
first block of the partition?  I'm guessing it's just getting confused
because of the size of the drive or number of cylinders, but I'd like to
make sure before I really screw something up.  Or worse, screw it up in
such a way that it doesn't show up until I run out of space on a
partition and take out both it and the following one...

Thanks for any clues anyone can toss my way!
-- Tracy Nelson

--
To unsubscribe, send a message with the word 'unsubscribe' in the subject
or body of your message to plug-request@lists.nothinbut.net